This cartoon is a piece of Nazi propaganda, which can be compared with the previous US ones. It has the same adult material wrapped up in a cozy children’s view of the world.

Two things of note here: in my opinion it is really not of the same graphic standard as US cartoons of the same era, which is interesting since much of what the Nazis produced was very sophisticated, graphically; secondly, I’m posting this from France where this video was blocked by Youtube (France has active censorship laws against Nazi material) and I had to access through a US proxy. An example of why application of censorship laws can be ridiculous, since the whole point of this German film was to learn from the mistakes of the past rather than approve of them.

This week on Smashing Telly, I’ll be focusing on historically interesting cartoons. This one is a black take on Snow White, which on the face of it is an outrageous piece of racist stereotyping. The setting and colors used are the deep reds of a cartoon bordello hell, versus the pastel blues of Snow White and her angel choir backing singers. On the other hand, Coal Black’s world is positively swingin’, and perhaps just goes to show how clawingly saccharin ‘white’ culture really was.

The London Times’ technology section ran this piece showing the current state of the art in 3d animation. Normally this stuff is not that interesting and just a bit naff. But, having used 3d animation software fairly intensively in the past, this does seem genuinely impressive.